Harry Boyte Talks about the Forgotten Meaning of "Citizen," Minneapolis ICE Protests and More
Newsletter # 424 - February 13, 2026
Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess
I (Heidi Burgess) first talked with Harry Boyte in January of 2025. Harry is a scholar and trainer focused on citizenship and nonviolence. He is also very active with Braver Angels and was eager to talk to us again about the newly formed Braver Angels’ Citizens Scholar Council.
We were also eager to talk to Harry about the events in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as he lives there. For those who watch this later and don’t know or don’t remember, the U.S. Federal Government in the form of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) have established a very large and hostile presence in the city, which, at the time of our talk, had resulted not only in thousands of arrests, but also the shooting death of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Petti. As we did in our first conversation, in this second conversation, which took place on February 2, 2026, we talked about how Harry’s early experiences in the 1960s civil rights movement informs his work now, and talked a lot about what’s going on now in Minneapolis and the U.S. more broadly, and how citizens can best respond to it.
We started our discussion by talking about the new Braver Angels' Citizens Scholar Council and other Braver Angels' programs and activities. Braver Angels has long been known for holding constructive conversations across lines of difference, especially across the red-blue partisan divide in the United States. They have also held debates, which are not adversarial, as are regular debates, but are conversational, designed to help people better hear and understand views of people on the other side — without disputing or attacking them. The goal of these activities has been depolarization: teaching people to listen to and respect other people who have different points of view.
However, Harry, explained:
A number of Reds in the organization (Reds are the Republicans or more conservative people), started saying, "Well, talk is fine, but what are we doing?" We want to make an impact on our communities. And so, since my own background has been in civic organizing and civic change, I helped form a group now called the Citizen-led Solution Support Team. ... We pushed the organization to think about taking action, and also to think in larger civic terms about impact, beyond simple depolarization. Depolarizing is important, and it's continuing to be important. But it's not the same as making culture change or making a better community. Depolarization alone is on a more personal scale.
At the same time, Braver Angels has had a change of leadership. We have a new president named Maury Giles, who is very action-oriented. Maury came in with a strong conviction that Braver Angels had to be a kind of catalyst, not itself the embodiment of a movement, but a catalyst for a broad movement encouraging culture change and putting the concept of "courageous citizenship" at the center of that. How do we make citizenship reappear in our society, as well as "citizen" being an identity? That’s a central question the Civic Scholars Council will address, through many angles.
Harry went on to explain that there are two distinct meanings of the words "citizen" and "citizenship." The one that is most used today is a strictly legal definition. A person is either a legal citizen of the U.S. or one is not.
Political theorist James Tulley calls this “civil citizenship.” It is government-centered and defined by legal status. One enjoys certain rights as a formal legal member of a polity. But it's not empowering, really.
Harry also called this "vertical citizenship" — it is the relationship between citizens on the bottom, and the government on the top. And the rights a person has are very much dependent upon whether a person is a citizen or not.
Given the Trump administration's aggressive and cruel push to deport illegal immigrants, this distinction has become highly salient on both sides of the partisan divide. Many people (especially those on the Left) are trying to hide or ignore the distinction, believing that all people should be treated the same way, regardless of whether they are legal citizens or not. As a result, many school districts, city offices, churches, and other private sector entities are eliminating the word "citizen" from their websites and materials, replacing it with the word "individuals" or "residents." Those terms are seen to be more "inclusive," while "citizen" is now seen by some as being "racist."
However, Harry explains, this is a very unfortunate narrowing of the term "citizen" and it completely loses the important meaning of the term "citizenship."
The second meaning of the term "citizen," which, he says has "pretty much disappeared," is what Tulley called "civic citizenship," which Harry also calls "horizontal citizenship."
The first is vertical, involving the individual's relations to the state. The second is among citizens — what people actually do to build a better community and create a democratic society. It's the activities of citizenship... including [he later said] such things as volunteering, engaging in acts of kindness, all of which are really important—that's the communitarian strand of civic citizenship. We also stress work and work sites and institutions which are created by work at sites of citizenship. I saw this in practice in the civic preachers and teachers and business people and truck drivers and sharecroppers of the [civil rights] movement. We’ve developed a conceptual language around the work of citizenship.
So, all of the effort that people expend to make their towns, states, and country a better place, no matter their legal status, is "citizenship: too, in this second sense of the word. And if we are going to re-establish a strong society and a strong democracy in this country, Harry said, and we agree, we are going to have to regain and reinvigorate this second sense of "citizenship."
As the previous quote hinted, Harry has an amazing background. When he was a young man, his father worked for Martin Luther King. Harry slept on his dad's motel room floor the night before King made his "I Have a Dream Speech" at the 1968 March on Washington, listening to King rehearse that speech. Harry later worked with the "citizenship schools" that were sponsored by Dr. King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
We had about 900 citizenship schools. Tens of thousands of people went through them. Andy Young called them the leadership base of the whole movement. And I think that's probably true in communities across the south. Citizenship was far more than legal status. It was about a new sense of what King called “somebody-ness,” dignity, pride, self-worth. . ... Citizenship schools taught nonviolence, but they also talked in depth about a different kind of citizenship. And people would have long conversations, very animated, energized conversations about what is a citizen?
This notion of civic or horizontal citizenship actually has a long history in the United States, Harry explained.
The idea that citizenship is much more than simply legal status was at the heart of the civil rights movement and the older freedom movement. Blacks didn't have legal status under slavery. For instance David Walker in 1829, a Black journalist in Boston, made an appeal to colored citizens of the United States. He wasn't equating that with legal status. He was saying, in effect, "the citizen is an agent of culture change. We need to change the society. We need to institute a different understanding of human equality and dignity." So that just was DNA of the movement.
Forgetting this meaning of citizenship, Harry observed, is a huge loss.
George Bush made his campaign in 2000 about the call to citizenship, the communitarian service version, which is important. Barack Obama in 2008 said "citizenship is us all doing our part." “All hands on deck,” was a slogan, along with “yes we can” and “I'm running to revitalize citizenship.” Government can't solve complex problems by itself.
Those campaigns were high-profile, but since then the language of citizenship has largely disappeared from public discussion. Horizontal or civic citizenship has been replaced with vertical citizenship -- this notion of legal status.. ... Robust citizenship that builds better communities is much more powerful.
Harry later explained:
The other thing that's really important is the idea of citizenship as a kind of office. The Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said "the highest office in a democracy is the Office of Citizen". Jimmy Carter said the same thing when he left the office of president. He said, "I'm going to the office that is more important than President," which is the Office of Citizen.
It sounds rhetorical, unless you examine it carefully. What it means is that citizenship is an identity. It's rising above immediate conflicts. The [civil rights'] movement was very clear about this.
Guy asked Harry whether Harry's distinction between horizontal and vertical citizenship is parallel to the distinction between rights of citizens and obligations of citizens. "This is a time where we focus a lot on rights," Guy observed, "but we don't think about our obligations to other citizens or to the country."
Harry said it was related to that, because the "civic understanding of citizenship includes responsibilities to be a good citizen, to be a caring neighbor, to be involved in the community, to help make it a better place." Then he continued:
But I would say the public work theory conveys the idea of building communities and building a democracy. That adds to responsibilities a capacity focus. It's the capacities and the agency and the sense of dignity and ownership, one develops when you help to build something. So that's another dimension of it.
Heidi then observed the importance of agency, which she said,
reflects one of the big problems that we're facing now. The "notion of a good citizen" is no longer widely seen as working together to help your community or your nation solve problems. It's seen as fighting for your side to beat the other side. People don't think they have the agency to actually make things better. At best, they can do their small part to get their candidates elected, who then, they hope, might make things better.
We then turned our conversation to the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota), where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) have been running a massive dragnet to catch illegal immigrants, and catching legal citizens in their nets as well, so far killing two. The response has been a massive public resistance. Harry recounted:
The level of activation in the cities, in response to the 3,000 ICE agents who've come and been pretty brutal, is remarkable. Tens of thousands of people out in this deep sub-zero weather. Businesses closed on the day of the strike, January 23. Big businesses said "we have to de-escalate" and "you have to cooperate across jurisdictions." The Guthrie Theater and the great music site, the First Avenue, they all closed on Friday.
And then, on a person-to-person level, the response is cross-partisan and phenomenal. People helping their neighbors who are immigrants who are afraid to go to the store because they might be targeted. People providing watch around Spanish immersion schools. And the cell phone videotaping of ICE agents, which has made a lot of difference because otherwise, there'd be a lot of things that are invisible that should be known. All of that is this expression of civic culture.
So the scale of activation is amazing. ... But the civic movement lacks the hopefulness that I remember from civil rights.
That was a product of a nonviolence and a vibrant vison of democracy [people had in the 60s]. In recent decades, nonviolence has become redefined as simply tactical The change began in the late '60s with people like the Stokely Carmichael wing of the movement, and then Gene Sharp in 1973 with his Politics of Nonviolent Action, which explicitly eschewed the philosophy of nonviolence. He said nonviolent philosophy is only for a few true believers, not the movement. Well, he wasn't in the movement, so I know that was wrong. All you have to do is read King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom, about the Montgomery Bus Boycott. King describes in detail the way people were transformed and developed what he calls a new sense of "somebody-ness" among tens of thousands of black people. There were church services on nonviolence every night. I was just a kid then, so I only heard about them. The training was only a little part of it. It was actually the philosophy that was galvanizing and inspiring and uplifting. ...
It fed into a different story of America. So the movement was not only about activity around an issue as important as the segregation issue was. It was also about a democratic story of America and revitalizing and giving that new meaning and giving it new life, a new spirit and energy.
And the idea of citizenship was central.
That idea is missing today, Harry observed several times, largely in part because our concept of "citizen" has become so narrow. And our image of America has become so negative too. Harry noted that
I read a piece by Richard Kahlenberg, he directs the American Identity Project at The Progressive Policy Institute. They did a study of American Studies journals and found that 80% of the articles were attacking something about America. And 20% were neutral. There were no positives. So that's on the left, and then you get this kind of celebratory triumphalism on the conservative side. It's a mess on both sides.
The challenge is recovering a strong, robust narrative of American democracy, which is not idealized. It's never been perfect, and it's a journey, not a destination. But it is an effort to build a better society. And there have been some triumphant moments — but this is even invisible in the academic literature.
For example, there were 5,000 schools that black communities built during the dark days of segregation. They were called Rosenwald schools, for a fund at Tuskegee that they could apply to for a third of the cost of building a school. So they built schools, which were centers of community life and leadership. They had a very strong citizenship emphasis and hope.
Most of the leaders of the movement came out of the Rosenwald Schools, Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, Angela, Medgar Evers, and then thousands of local leaders went through Rosenwald schools. But that history is pretty unknown.
I'm hoping that this year one of the tasks of our Civic Scholars Council can be to unearth great civic moments of everyday citizens building a better democracy and better communities.
Guy and Harry talked about the power of the 1968 March on Washington.
King had a gift that I think is not really understood very well. This was kind of like this rising to the station. He could sense the mood of a crowd and then kind of uplift it to a higher level, a sense of one's better self. And the speech did that. But he was also playing off of the fact that the marchers themselves had the decorum and the discipline and the calm that you describe.
And I thought this was amazing. I was an 18-year-old kid, angry at the world. And I was just dumbfounded by the marchers of all ages and backgrounds and some walking hundreds of miles to get there and buses and trains. So the dignity and the discipline, which are well captured by the program notes, they convey that. And I think that actually had an enormous impact. That's not often remarked upon, but people could see it. They could see some things that worked there. Something different. Some people have a higher sense of who they are, a bigger, larger, more uplifted sense of who they are. And that's an extraordinarily significant moment in the movement history.
Heidi asked "Do you see that in Minneapolis now?"
And Harry responded:
No. Because people don't have the same narrative of where this is going. They have a tremendous sense of resistance and also compassion towards their neighbors and a lot of things that reflect the civic history and culture of the Twin Cities. But hope, no. People are pretty discouraged and desperate.
We talked about that more, we talked about the civil rights history of the United States, and even the American revolution, which, Harry explained, was more a peoples' revolution than a leadership revolution. And we talked about what Braver Angels, other Bridging organizations, and what regular people can do now to replace discouragement and desperation with hope. See our whole discussion here.
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